There is a 35-year-old man who has been held prisoner by the United States for 11 years. His defense at trial? He was never tried. The charge filed against him? None. He has never been charged, either. The threat he poses to the United States? He isn't thought to pose any. His scheduled date of release? There isn't one. Despite all the rest, he is to be held indefinitely.

This despite the fact that he has been cleared for release!

He is attempting a hunger strike to protest his detention. It began when he was sick in the prison hospital and refused food. "A team from the E.R.F. (Extreme Reaction Force), a squad of eight
military police officers in riot gear, burst in," he stated. "They tied my hands and
feet to the bed. They forcibly inserted an IV into my hand. I spent 26
hours in this state, tied to the bed. During this time I was not
permitted to go to the toilet. They inserted a catheter, which was
painful, degrading and unnecessary." Here's how life has been going for him since: "Either I can exercise my
right to protest my detention, and be beaten up, or I can submit to
painful force-feeding."

What's it like to be force fed?

I will never forget the first time they passed the feeding tube up my
nose. I can't describe how painful it is to be force-fed this way. As it
was thrust in, it made me feel like throwing up. I wanted to vomit, but
I couldn't. There was agony in my chest, throat and stomach. I had
never experienced such pain before. I would not wish this cruel
punishment upon anyone.

The description is uncomfortably reminiscent of how people describe waterboarding*. He continued:

I am still being force-fed.

Two times a day they tie me to a chair in my
cell. My arms, legs and head are strapped down. I never know when they
will come. Sometimes they come during the night, as late as 11 p.m.,
when I'm sleeping... During one force-feeding the nurse pushed the tube about 18 inches into
my stomach, hurting me more than usual, because she was doing things so
hastily. I called the interpreter to ask the doctor if the procedure was
being done correctly or not. It was so painful that I begged them to stop feeding me. The nurse
refused to stop feeding me.

All that is from "Hunger Striking at Guantanamo Bay," one of the most bracing op-eds ever published in the New York Times. It must've been an especially bracing read for one man in particular. Said the prisoner, "The only reason I am still here is that President Obama refuses to send
any detainees back to Yemen. This makes no sense. I am a human being,
not a passport, and I deserve to be treated like one." Samir Naji al-Hasan Moqbel (read about the initial allegations against him, which he denies, here) is just the latest observer to point out that, along with the Bush Administration officials who opened Gitmo, the members of Congress hellbent on keeping it open, and the many Americans who concur, Obama bears responsibility for this injustice.

He is doing a historic wrong.

Glenn Greenwald details his particular role in Gitmo, and the way that some of his supporters obscure it. "The people in the faction who
spent years denouncing it as a Great Evil now instead rush to exonerate
President Obama for any responsibility or blame," he writes. "They insist that the
fault rests with Congress for preventing Obama from fulfilling his
pledge." He goes on:

This claim, though grounded in some truth, is misleading in the extreme .... Obama sought not to close
Guantánamo but simply to re-locate it to Illinois,
and in doing so, to preserve what makes it such a travesty of justice:
its system of indefinite detention. The detainees there are not
protesting in desperation because of their geographical location: we want to be in Illinois rather than a Cuban island.
They are sacrificing their health and their lives in response to being
locked in a cage for more than a decade without charges: a system Obama, independent of what Congress did, intended to preserve. Obama's task force in early 2010 decreed
that "48 detainees were determined to be too dangerous to transfer but
not feasible for prosecution" and will thus "remain in detention": i.e.
indefinitely imprisoned with no charges. Given these facts, one cannot
denounce the disgrace of Guantánamo's indefinite detention system while
pretending that Obama sought to end it, at least not cogently or
honestly.

The United States now has three options with respect to the prisoners who are cleared for release and engaged in a hunger strike. Is the most moral, prudent course of action to release them, to let them starve to death, or to force a feeding tube down their throats twice a day, indefinitely?

Conor Friedersdorf is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he focuses on politics and national affairs. He lives in Venice, California, and is the founding editor of The Best of Journalism, a newsletter devoted to exceptional nonfiction.